Working Around Transfer Manifest Issues in I502

The design of the Inventory Transfer Manifest system by the State of Washington is causing massive headaches for the Producers, Processor and Retailers here.

The core of the problem is the lack of flexibility in the system. The root cause is either in the regulations or the implementation of said regulations. Really however, what caused it to be broken is less important for the business owners because they need to fix problems in the broken system today – not 24 months ago when these problems were being created.

Recipients Cannot Reject Inventory

In all other businesses it’s a trivial process to reject a delivery in whole or in part. You ship us 1500 bricks, we can refuse 500 and the delivery person will take them back to the origin. Just a bit of paperwork and books to settle. Under I-502 the ability to reject inventory is almost entirely lost. One certainly cannot reject N% of an order. It must be refused in its entirety. And if you receive the inventory to do a return process there are issues with quarantine periods as well as re-creating an outbound manifest from your business with details on it describing the vehicle and employee of the origin business. It’s a mess.

Any issues with an item on a manifest basically poison the entire manifest and all the contained items. They get stuck in a bureaucratic corner.

Making the Manifest Work

Until the State of Washington fixes their system the best way to reduce friction in the sale and delivery of inventory items through the regulated chain of custody is to issue single lot-item manifests.

It’s slightly more work on the origin side; making the manifest for each lot that will be delivered. On the recipient side they will have to lookup and import one manifest for each.

However! If there is an issue with the delivery it’s limited to just the one item on the one manifest! This allows all the other items to bereceived properly and business can go forward.

An Example:

I would make at minimum five manifests. One each for the lot items. But also, I’d think about splitting the 100x site lot into two lots. This way, if there is a problem I could still deliver 50x of them.

Problems Ripple

It seems like a lot of work to avoid such an odd issue. However, product rejections happen or delivery schedules get messed up. There are 1000s of external influences on your business. When a delivery is delayed this causes additional transport and paperwork issues for sure but it also causes financial issues in the form of delayed revenues. Money today is worth more than money four days from now.